THE SCREEN

...He rides off to an ovation as Bill paces sulkily in the wings, having demonstrated once again his unerring misjudgment of men and events...

...In the first scene Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) hails the great hulk of an Indian who rides head and shoulders above the rest of his people...

...While she sings at the President's reception, Bill glories in the glances and gestures she throws his way...

...While Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) strides out of the arena after attempting an impossible shot, her lover-manager (John Considine) capers behind smiling and waving to the crowd...

...In the first scene it is his illusions about someone else that misguide him, in the second it is his illusions about himself, but the effect is the same...

...The history lesson Sitting Bull has for Bill, then, is that it is a greater thing to be than to seem...

...In the second scene Bill makes eyes at a lyric-soprano traveling in President Cleveland's retinue...

...A toast Bill is drinking to himself is paralyzed halfway to his mouth by a remark Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster) makes that "It was the thrill of my life to have invented you...

...In the scene of Sitting Bull's arrival, once he has figured out who Sitting Bull is, Bill again tries to welcome him to "my Wild West," as he calls the tent city and arena he has built at Fort Ruth, Colorado...

...But the unforeseen danger, which Annie's little mishaps reveal, is that we shall begin to take everything for performance, and lose our ability to recognize what's real...

...Sometimes Altman makes us aware of this difficulty by showing us an image in a painting, a mirror or a photograph instead of its subject...

...Using an eight-track sound system, he overlaps dialogue in such a way that we only get what is being said in bits and snatches, and the action in his films often seems equally layered and intermittent...

...I don't think Bill learns the lesson, though, and the implication is that we haven't either...

...But his presence alone is an unnerving accusation...

...In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, for example, we notice that the scenes marking the beginning and end of Sitting Bull's career with Buffalo Bill's show are curious mirror images of each other...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...We've got the Bicentennial...

...But BUI is wrong about this too, of course, for the point is that his Wild West is the world of flim-flam that was to replace the real world as our national heritage...

...The sub-title of Altman's film is Sitting Bull's History Lesson, and in the playing out of the parallel Annie's act establishes between these scenes in the arena, we see what the lesson is...

...It affects Bill much the way the apparition of Clarence affects Richard III, and like Richard, Bill delivers a distraught monologue, a soliloquy on himself to himself...

...In Nashville it seemed Altman wanted to do away with plot altogether and simply allow a couple of dozen characters to criss-cross paths like so many contestants in a demolition derby...

...Both are receptions, the first in honor of the arrival of Sitting Bull himself (Frank Kacquitts), the second in honor of a visit from President Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick...

...It's because she has, blowing a hole in his shoulder...

...Where Sitting Bull's first appearance in the arena proves wrong Bill's prediction he would be humiliated, the President's attendance at his second appearance proves his own dream right...

...Sitting Bull is the runt with a far-away look in his eyes behind Halsey...

...It's like watching a three-ring circus from the end of the arena, each scene a jumble of events that occur simultaneously in foreground and background...

...After Sitting Bull has been killed, Bill dreams that the Chief comes back to visit him one night at Fort Ruth...

...Bill has predicted that because Sitting Bull refuses to perform in any way, he is going to be humiliated...

...The second time we see Sitting Bull in the arena, at the command performance for the President, it demonstrates that he has in supernatural abundance the very qualities Bill lacks: insight, intuition, judgment...

...But as we can all tell by now, even if Bill himself can't, his kind of history is, as Sitting Bull once observed, "nothing more than disrespect for the dead...

...Bill's functionaries even persuade the President that the hole he sees in Annie's manager is play acting, a part of the performance...

...In this reciprocation of scenes, the night show done for President Cleveland becomes the counterpart of the day show when Annie stalks off...

...Again at the night show Annie exits prematurely, though it's not because her manager has screwed up this time...

...Unfortunately, this turns out to be Halsey (Will Sampson), Sitting Bull's interpreter...

...As he basks in her glory and takes her bows, however, we can hear her accusing him of cowardice, and we can hear him pleading with her not to rush off because, "God knows, I can't do the act myself...

...Yet in any Altman film we also have the sense a Rorschach card immediately gives us that there is some overall design here...

...Our great grandfathers had Buffalo Bill...

...There is an encompassing symmetry, and aesthetic order to help us compensate for the formlessness and muddle of events...

...In each scene, the act that follows Annie's is Sitting Bull's...

...But it then comes to light that her overtures were directed at General Benjamin, the runt with pomaded hair just behind Bill...

...It is "an invitation impossible to resist," he confides to her afterwards...

...But at least in the first scene, act is the wrong word, for Sitting Bull only rides to the center of the arena and sits there...

...Apparently Bill still thinks that he has to teach history to Sitting Bull, instead of the other way round...

...He is simply present, as he was the first time he appeared in Bill's arena...

...In effect Altman's whole film is about the relationship between illusion and substance, fakery and the genuine article, and the difficulty of telling them apart...

...At other times, when he is at his best, he creates our awareness through a disparity between what we see and what we hear...

...But after jeers and then uncertain silence, the crowd is won over just by the presence of Sitting Bull...

...It is that character is ultimately more durable, and maybe even more powerful, than mere cunning...

...Annie's performance in this scene also cues us to another of those ink-blot symmetries in the film, perhaps the central one...

...The dashing figure Bill cuts shooting skeet with a pistol is undermined by a letter being read to him in which his wife accuses him of stinginess, drunkenness, infidelity, etc...

...Just as he tries to cover up her departure with bows earlier, as if it were part of the act, so now she tries to cover his...

...Bill has his own dream to contend with, a dream that is a source not of enlightenment, like Sitting Bull's, but of torment...

...Sitting Bull says nothing...

...The reverse images of one another that these two scenes present reflect a single truth about Bill: that his intuition of the world, his judgment of people and events, his eye for intention and authenticity, is unswervingly wrong...

...I think you'll find it ain't all that different than the real world," he assures the Sioux chief...

...The purpose of "the" show business, which Bill and partner Nate Salsbury (Joel Grey) are inventing right before our eyes in this movie, is to sucker the audience into accepting performance as reality...

...Of course Altman's work always strikes us as being, like a Rorschach card, a chaos of forces, an art whose implications have run wild...

...THE SCREEN PRESENT AT THE CREATION THE SCREEN In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Robert Altman has taken American history and folded it back against itself as if he wanted to make an enormous Rorschach card out of it as if he wanted to use it therapeutically so that in the study of its murky squiggles we might discover ourselves...

...Sitting Bull has joined the Wild West only because he dreamed he would meet "the Great Father" there a dream Bill finds so laughable, he has given Sitting Bull a contract with a release clause should the President ever come to Fort Ruth...